The Watchers

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  Maddie jerked a sharp look at her. “When you …?”

  Realizing Madelyn was confused, Claire elaborated. “After I got out of the hospital.”

  “You went back?” she exclaimed. “My god, Claire! Are you out of your fucking mind? What were you thinking?”

  Claire uttered a huff of breath that was a mixture of impatience and acknowledgement that Maddie was right. It had been crazy! “I was thinking that when I was trapped and thought I was going to die that I’d seen an angel and I had to know if I really had or if it was purely imagination.”

  Maddie studied her a long moment. “And that’s when you found this?”

  Claire nodded. “Yes, it was stuck in between two stones.”

  “In the sinkhole?”

  Claire shrugged. “Not really. The sinkhole revealed a cavern where there was a … well it looked like a city to me. I found that stuck between the cobblestones of the street that ran through it. And that’s where … when I actually met the angel, Dante. Well—the second time, but the first time he looked like a priest. He’s the one that brought me here.”

  Chapter Seven

  Maddie was completely focused on the coin—or seemed to be—for many moments. “You found a lost city at the bottom of a sinkhole?”

  Claire frowned. “That’s what it looked like to me. I don’t guess we’ll ever know now, though. It was flooded when the trench opened up and filled with debris from half the city falling in.”

  Maddie blinked at her. “What? Oh my god! What city? Tampa?”

  Claire wasn’t surprised her sister had no knowledge of what they’d found at the bottom of that sinkhole. In the first place, Madelyn could focus like nobody else Claire knew, blocking out pretty much everything and everybody around her. In the second, the dig she and her team were currently working on was in the back of nowhere—so far from civilization of any kind she was sure very little news about the world filtered to them here. And in the third—well, she might well be the only person still living who knew about it.

  That thought sent a cold shiver of fear through her.

  Maybe she shouldn’t tell Madelyn at all? Was she putting her sister in mortal danger by doing so?

  Maddie stared at her. “Don’t clam up on me now! Tell me!”

  Claire bit her lip. “It could be dangerous for you to know.”

  Maddie blinked at her. “What? That doesn’t make any sense, Claire!”

  “It makes way more sense than you think!” She realized that she’d already said too much, however. Maddie wasn’t going to let it go until she had the whole story and, truthfully, Claire had always considered knowledge was the best weapon against danger. Generally, the more people who knew a dangerous secret, the less ‘secret’ it was, and the less likely it was to be contained by knocking off people, then the more pointless it was to try. “He said there were things we weren’t allowed to know and it could mean our death to pry ….”

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  “Father Moreno.”

  “Who? Who the hell is Father Moreno?”

  Claire shook her head. “I need to start at the beginning to make any sense at all—not that it does to me anyway—make sense! But maybe it will make some sense to you—The angel, Dante, was disguised as Father Moreno the first time I met him ….”

  “Oh! That makes it crystal clear! And then he told you he was an angel?”

  Claire narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a nut case! You’re the one that was going on about the flying saucer!”

  Madelyn sucked in a calming breath and let it out slowly. “Ok. Right. How was he disguised? I mean, how do you know he’s really an angel?”

  “Well, there was the wings,” Claire said dryly. “Look! I don’t know how he managed to look completely human when he was dressed like a priest, but I guess he has the ability to manipulate people’s perceptions. He’s telepathic.”

  Madelyn frowned. “Well, maybe he made you think he looked like an angel when in reality he’s human?”

  Claire shrugged. “And the flying saucer?”

  Madelyn blinked at her several times. “Ok. Never mind about that part. He’s an alien that looks like an angel and he warned you away from the sinkhole where you saw this lost city?”

  “No. He actually is an angel—never mind! Right! I’d gone down, like I said, to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy. And I thought, then, that I must have seen a statue because I could see something had been removed. Then I decided to have a look around where they’d strung lights and saw a wall frieze or tablet with an inscription I couldn’t read. I found this gold button or coin stuck between the stones on the floor while I was looking around. It was when I was leaving that I ran into the angel and he … uh … warned me.” Discomfort slithered through her at the memories that conjured. She felt her face heat and hoped Maddie wouldn’t notice and conclude that she was hiding something.

  Madelyn stared at Claire in silence for many moments when she’d finished and then studied the coin in her hand speculatively. “Sooo … you’re saying this coin might be some of the information we aren’t allowed to have?”

  Claire gaped at her. “Oh my god! I honestly didn’t think about that! You think … maybe it isn’t a coin at all? Maybe it’s like … a memory chip or something?”

  Madelyn snorted. “This is too old to be something like that—unless you’re an alien conspiracy theorist! Sorry, but even you can tell it’s really old, surely?”

  “Yes! I can tell it’s really old!” Claire snapped. “I guess you’ve already forgotten I got here by flying saucer? And it was an alien that brought me and warned me off? It could be thousands or even millions of years old and that still wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some alien lost it here and it has data we aren’t allowed privy to on it! It might be exactly what he was looking for down there!”

  “Oh my god! Good point,” Madelyn murmured contritely. “Stop looking so guilty—like you got me into trouble! I mean, really, I’m not particularly worried about the aliens—not any that have been on Earth for the past several thousand years. Sounds to me like our technology has just about caught up to theirs.

  “Ok, so the flying saucer was pretty impressive, and the way he beamed you down, but we have all kinds of wild new technology on the horizon! We have people working on cloaks that make you seem to disappear if they don’t actually make you disappear. And people working on quantum technology that could make you really disappear by transporting you ….” She stopped, looking guilty herself for several moments.

  Claire frowned, realizing Maddie had inadvertently let something slip about her husband’s research. “Robert’s work? He’s made headway on his project? But … that’s great news!”

  Madelyn sighed. “You know its top secret and he isn’t supposed to talk to anybody about it, including me, and I’m not supposed to know and the damned government has drones everywhere now to listen in.”

  “Good point!” Claire agreed, disappointed that Maddie wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell her more, but in complete agreement that it could be dangerous to discuss it—for all of them. The government was very, very jealous of their secrets! And their favorite secrets were the ones involving the technology they were developing.

  “Ok, so this just looks like a very, very old coin to me,” Maddie said, reverting to the previous dangerous topic. “We could clean it up a bit more so we could study it and run some tests on it. I don’t have the field equipment I’d need to do the tests we’d need to run, but we could make a trip into Cairo.” She paused, gnawing her lower lip in a mannerism very similar to Claire’s nervous habit. “The thing is …. I think we’re really on to something here, Claire, and I can’t bear to think of someone else finding something really significant while I’m not even here to see it. I think we’ve found a city that was part of a lost civilization. We’re trying to keep it hush, hush until we can verify some of our data, but ….”

  Maddie paused, looking around as
if she expected to discover a spy drone hovering near her shoulder. “Here’s the weird part,” she added after a few moments, lowering her voice to a level only slightly above a whisper, “it looks more modern than it should—way more—by hundreds if not thousands of years. This is the main reason we’ve been trying to keep it secret. It’s a career breaker. This is either going to earn me a place in the history books or I’m going down in flames as a crackpot instead of a serious scientist.”

  Claire frowned. “I am so totally lost.”

  Impatience flickered across Madelyn’s face. She shook her head and got up, tucking the coin into her pocket for safe keeping. “Let’s clean this up a bit and have a better look and then I’ll show you.”

  After a brief search, Madelyn located a shallow dish, a bottle of water, and a small bottle of hydrochloric acid. Placing the dish on a flat topped chest near the cot, she took the coin from her pocket and squirted some of the acid on the limestone that had built up on the coin.

  Claire moved closer and watched as the acid dissolved the limestone.

  Madelyn turned it after a few moments to make sure the acid was cleaning both sides. When she was satisfied that most if not all of the lime build up had been removed by the acid, she rinsed the piece with water and held it in the light filtering into the tent to study it.

  Claire sidled closer, trying to examine it over her sister’s shoulder. “That looks … sort of like a maze, doesn’t it?”

  Madelyn was frowning thoughtfully. “Sort of,” she murmured. “It reminds me of a design I saw somewhere, but I can’t place it.”

  “I know where I saw it! I thought it was a spiral glyph that I saw when I was in the cavern. But it was this design.”

  Madelyn looked at her with heightened interest. “You’re sure?”

  Claire thought it over, summoning the image to mind. “Pretty sure. I couldn’t see the entire thing. There was a lot of limestone build up down there, but I think so.”

  “Hmm,” Madelyn murmured. “Well, I wasn’t there so that’s definitely not where I saw it. Maybe I’m mistaken? Maybe it’s just similar to something I saw before. Didn’t you say you thought the place might be Spanish?”

  “I might have mentioned that I thought the statue must be Spanish,” Claire said a little doubtfully. “But that was when I thought Dante wasn’t real—thought I’d seen a statue. I didn’t see anything about the site that made me think it was Spanish. And anyway, I was just guessing at that because the Spanish were the first white settlers in Florida as far as anybody knows and I knew the statue couldn’t have been done by the natives that were there before.”

  “Maybe I was just thinking so loud I thought I heard you say that …,” Maddie murmured. “This isn’t Spanish. I don’t know what it is, but I know what it isn’t. We’ll have to see if we can get it dated. I don’t see a date on it. In fact, if this is writing at all you couldn’t prove it by me. I don’t even see anything that looks like a number. Which makes me doubtful it’s a coin …. But it could be. Just saying it seems like it would have a number value on it—a year—a ruler.”

  She tucked the coin back into her pocket. “Come on. Now I’m going to show you mine.”

  Grinning at her sister’s suggestive comment, Claire got up and followed Madelyn from the tent. It was already mid-morning by that time and the workers looked like ants moving over the dig a short distance away from the camp. When they reached the edge of the pit that had been dug, Claire felt her stomach fall out from under her.

  It wasn’t just the fact that the excavation was a lot deeper than she’d expected, though. The workers had already unearthed what looked to be a good portion of a pyramid shaped temple.

  Except—aside from the pyramid shape—this structure didn’t look like any Claire had ever seen. She frowned. “It doesn’t look Sumerian ….”

  “Because it isn’t. As near as I can tell this site predates the Sumerians by at least ten thousand years.”

  Claire gaped at her, her mind frantically tabulating that information. She frowned. “Ubaidians? Or Semites?”

  “Neither—I’m pretty sure. What we know about them suggests they were simple farmers. They weren’t capable of building anything like this.” Madelyn led the way to the nearest ladder, climbing down with a complete disregard for the ramshackle design and construction.

  Claire couldn’t ignore that particular aspect, however. She followed Maddie reluctantly and far more slowly. Maddie had already descended three more levels and was halfway across the dig site before Claire managed to catch up to her. She wasn’t sure she would’ve caught her then except Maddie stopped abruptly and crouched down.

  When Claire crouched beside her she found herself looking at what was clearly a very detailed written record around what appeared to be the entrance. It wasn’t the cuneiform of the Sumerians—the (previous) earliest known written language. It wasn’t any written language that Claire recognized.

  She gaped at it, trying to take it in. “I don’t recognize this writing ….”

  “Because it’s never been seen before!” Madelyn responded, her voice high with excitement. “This writing predates any that has been discovered before. The geology and depth suggest this site dates back around twenty thousand years … possibly as much as thirty. It we find artifacts that can be carbon dated that will back that up, we’re looking at a whole new civilization that no one in modern history ever heard of.

  “We’re looking at rewriting history altogether! Because if I have even the approximate date right, this shouldn’t exist! Mankind would’ve still been nomads—hunter-gatherers.

  “I found it by satellite. Satellite images indicate a dried riverbed that we’d determined could be the Pison from Biblical references of one of the rivers that watered ‘the garden’, but the city isn’t mentioned in the Bible that we can tell, or folklore, local legends, or any historical records that I’ve found.”

  Claired blinked at her. “But … that can’t be right, can it? Wouldn’t that be around the time the Neanderthals lived? When was it that Early Homo Sapiens first emerged? Wait! The garden? You’re talking about the Garden of Eden?”

  “Yes, the Garden. Neanderthals seem to have died out around thirty thousand years ago, but early modern humans had existed alongside them for around a hundred thousand years—so, yes, this site could have been built around the time the Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record but not actually when Modern Human emerged—unless you mean emerged as the victors in evolution?

  “And we have indications that Early Modern Human migrated back into the middle east here at least fifty thousand years ago, but the thing is that although they were physically very little different from modern man, behaviorally there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of difference between them and the Neanderthals—they lived much the same. They were hunter-gathers, as far as we know, like the Neanderthals.

  “So this city we mapped out with ground penetrating radar, going by satellite images that seemed to point to the likelihood of there being ruins beneath the surface, pre-dates both the Sumerians, whom we know had a modern civilization, and the Ubaidians, who also lived here and farmed, but weren’t nearly as advanced as the Sumerians.”

  Claire simply stared at her blankly, her mind working on the information and trying to make it fit what she’d previously believed to be the truth.

  Madelyn shrugged. “Ok, so it’s possible this is the work of the Ubaidians, but I don’t think so and that’s not just because we haven’t previously found anything to indicate they were capable of building something like this. It’s also because it seems to predate their occupancy of this area by five to ten thousand years or so.”

  What were the odds, Claire thought, more than a little stunned, that they would both stumble upon previously unknown cities half a world apart at virtually the same time?

  Of course, Madelyn had hardly stumbled! She’d been carefully pouring over satellite images and checking them against maps and previous discoverie
s for years, looking for an archeological site to define her career. The coincidence was that Maddie was working on uncovering the results of years of searching at the same time Claire had fallen into a sinkhole right beside a cavern that hid yet another ancient city.

  She hadn’t consciously acknowledged it before, but she realized that the fact was that the geology surrounding the lost city in Florida had suggested that it was thousands—not hundreds —of years old—far too old to be anything the early Spanish explorers/colonists had built or left.

  She didn’t think it could possibly be anywhere near as old as Maddie was suggesting this place was, regardless of the depth of the find, but they’d definitely fallen into a discovery that was going to set the scientific world on its ear—the equivalent of finding a loaded pistol in a caveman’s hut.

  Or it would’ve been if they’d gotten the chance to excavate it. As it was, the gold piece she’d found might be the only evidence carried out of the dig—and she would have no way to prove the link whatever they discovered about it.

  Dismay washed over her, but the fact was they wouldn’t even have as much as they did if she hadn’t taken it.

  The ‘statue’ she’d thought she had seen obviously wasn’t a statue at all but rather Dante, which meant no statue had been recovered and she hadn’t seen anything that indicated anything else had been removed. And the collapse had happened at a time when the scientists/witnesses would most likely have been down in the hole working. Some of them might have made it out, but she didn’t know that any of them had survived.

  She’d been trying really, really hard to ignore the implications and convince herself she was just being paranoid. But maybe it was just too convenient that she’d been warned away from the dig and then it had collapsed, burying everything beneath tons of dirt, rock, steel, and concrete?

  She hadn’t heard an explosion or seen anything out of the ordinary before the collapse. That was why she’d initially dismissed any possibility that the accident hadn’t been an accident but rather manufactured. But maybe she’d been too quick to dismiss the possibility that it had been deliberate?